Creativity and Allah - Somebody Barstool this

[Cain]

Obviously that would explicitly have to be in a case where disorder was expected due to past experience.  Which is true for disorder and order anyway, as proven with creations/patterns that quickly become stale and well recognized.

[LMNO]

Yeah, but it can also be a combination of the 2.

I mean, the 12 bar Blues has been around for at least 100 years, but it's what goes on inside of the form that makes it creative. 

[Cain]

True.  I do feel the time aspect of disorder and order has been really overlooked, however.  Its totally essential, since disorder and order are not static properties but are bound in time and subject to change.  I'm not sure how to build on that, however.

[LMNO]

This is not to put words in your mouth, first of all.


To me, it sounds like you're saying Order + Time = Disorder, and Disorder + Time = Order.  Which is interesting.


Let me know if I have my head up my ass, please.

[Cain]

Kind of.  Not as such.  Thats part of it, certainly.  Given enough time, it seems any ordered system will become disordered and any disordered system can be recognized as ordered.  If the pattern takes 30 billion years to repeat, its going to look disordered until the point it can be recognized.  On the other hand, any ordered system can fall apart as pretty much everything in the Universe is temporary.

Time is an intrinsic factor in how we understand disorder and order.  Because these two are not traits in the sense we normally understand them we can only talk about how they are now, or were.  If something has no past, it can't be ordered at all and so its naturally going to be disordered.  Something I think could probably have a past and be disordered too, but I'm not certain.

This is very on the fly and intuitive thinking here, by the way.  So I may be wrong.  But I feel its something worth exploring.

[LMNO]

I like where you're going with this Time business.


The only way we can judge the predictability of something is to notice what changes over time.  If we don't have a past event to compare, it's unredictibility jumps to 100%, which could also be called "meaningless".


This also is touching on the "brain makes patterns" idea.  Perhaps the idea of creativity is also related to the amount of patterns a person can identify?

[DJRubberducky]

Right now I'm thinking of games of chance, and how because everyone knows such things are determined at random, they would actually freak the hell out if a visible pattern emerged, even though in a truly random system that visible pattern has as much chance of emerging as anything else.

Take lotto.  A long-ago friend of mine in Seattle once bought a lotto ticket with the numbers 1-2-3-4-5-6.  His friend swore up and down that he was a fucking idiot for picking those numbers, because there was no way in hell they'd ever come up.  But they could, just as easily as any other selection of six numbers between 1 and 54 you care to make.  But can you imagine the massive uproar that would ensue if any state lotto *did* come up 1-2-3-4-5-6.  IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE RANDOM!  WE SEE A PATTERN IN THESE NUMBERS, SO IT CAN'T BE RANDOM!

Disorder that looks orderly...that's giving me a headache.  No, wait, it's my sinuses.  Nevermind.

[Cain]

Yeah.  I'm just not sure how to proceed with it all, to be honest.  Like I said, it seems....obvious.  Maybe too obvious.  But its never discussed. And like I said, I haven't sat down and analyzed it in any great depth either.

[Bo]

True.  I do feel the time aspect of disorder and order has been really overlooked, however.  Its totally essential, since disorder and order are not static properties but are bound in time and subject to change.  I'm not sure how to build on that, however.

I think order and disorder are not even welldefined without a notion of time, for indeed the are inherent dynamical properties. For example if I have a photograph of a collection dots nicely ordered in a grid. this however does not tell me that the system is ordered, since all dots could be flying in different directions at different speeds. Order and disorder are defined by the predictability of a system both over space and time.

[LMNO]

Yeah.  I'm just not sure how to proceed with it all, to be honest.  Like I said, it seems....obvious.  Maybe too obvious.  But its never discussed. And like I said, I haven't sat down and analyzed it in any great depth either.

Well, it could have something to do with the common perception of Time as "something else", and almost separate from the Universe.

But modern physics has shown us that 4-dimentional space-time seems to be the best model we currently have, so whenever you talk about a "thing" in the universe, you're automatically talking about time, as well.


Did that make any sense at all?

[Bo]

You could also talk about disorder as the number of degrees of freedom your system has. (and a degree of freedom is then defined as 'a property that can change over time') The more freedom, the more disorder in general. (this is somewhat like an enthropy).

[LMNO]

Bo is hitting nails, up there.

[LHX]

i have some catching up to do ITT

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Here's the psychological perspective reduced to tard bites. 

The article is 10 pages long, and talks about feelings, so I parsed it for you sockfuckers.

Research suggests that creative people make more mistakes than their less imaginative peers.

Humor greases the wheels of creativity. When you're joking around, you're freer to consider any possibility--after all, you're only kidding.  Having fun helps you disarm the inner censor that all too quickly condemns your ideas as ludicrous.

One of the greatest creativity killers, however, is more subtle and so deeply rooted in our culture that it is hardly noticed. It has to do with time.

Children more naturally than adults enter that ultimate state of creativity called flow. In flow, time does not matter; there is only the timeless moment at hand. It is a state that is more comfortable for children than adults, who are more conscious of the passage of time.

Brain specialists tell us that the brain-wave pattern of a preadolescent child in the waking state is rich in theta waves. These waves are much rarer in adults, occurring most frequently during the hypnagogic state--a twilight zone bordering on sleep, where dreams and reality mix.

Thus a child's waking consciousness is comparable to a state of mind adults know mainly during these dreamlike moments as they fall asleep. This may be one reason a child's reality naturally embraces the zany and the bizarre, the silly and the terrifying. A child's waking awareness is more open to fresh perceptions and wild ideas.

With puberty, the child's brain changes to resemble an adult's. The theta brain waves and the wildly creative flair of the child begin to fade. Some people. however. continue to tap the richness of theta states later in life. Thomas Edison put the hypnagogic state to work when he was an adult. He had an unusual technique for doing this: He would doze off in a chair with his arms and hands draped over the armrests. In each hand he held a ball bearing. Below each hand on the floor were two pie plates. When he drifted into the state between waking and steeping, his hands would naturally relax and the ball bearings would drop on the plate. Awakened by the noise, Edison would immediately make notes on any ideas that had come to him.

"Creative people are committed to risk. The creative person always walks two steps into the darkness. Everybody can see what's in the light .. the real heroes delve in the dark."  -Benny Golson

Source

[Triple Zero]

(this is my reply on the entire thread so far, in some sort of order)

Back to the idea of combining.  So, under the premise that creating is putting 2 previously uncombined ideas together, does that mean that at some point creativity ceases to exist?  This of course going under the additional premise that we live in a world of finite resources.  But, then again, are ideas a finite source?

even if it were, combinations of finite elements can still be infinite.

for example, you can write an infinite amount of books with our finite 26-character alphabet.

combine this with the shortening/compression power of symbolism, and i don't think there's anything to worry about

Can you create something out of nothing?

this is a very different question, compared to the previous creating a new something out of old somethings.
the discussion is a difficult philosophical one. the answer is pretty much "yes". look up "emergence" on wikipedia.

We conceive of a flying pig because we have seen a pig and we have seen stuff fly.  So, we can create this fiction of a pig flying.  Did we have to have the reference points of "pigs" and "flying" to conceive of a flying pig.  If the human race had never experienced either pigs or flying would we have been able to conjure up that concept? 

yes this is possible. again i refer you to "emergence" on wikipedia.
in this case, the new idea is part of the sum of its elements. "pigs", "flying" leads to "pigs flying". addition. emergence is when the entire combination of a system of elements gives rise to a property that cannot be explained as the sum or difference of its parts.
wikipedia gives an elegant geometric example of two right-angled triangles. one of the properties of these triangles is that they have two sides (also called "orientable"). now, if we use these triangles, play with them and glue them together in the right way, we can create a moebius-strip, which has only one side (non-orientable). this is a new property that emerges from the system, et cannot be explained as the sum or difference of the properties of the triangles themselves.

(weird example, i know, but i thought it was cool)

also i once read about a computer program that was actually being taught how to be creative. it was basically trying out a whole lot of different solutions to a certain problem it was given, but it was guided in its search for optimality by some sort of "novelty" factor, which depended on how "surprising" a certain solution was.
(where "surprising" was defined by how well another computer program was able to predict what the first program was doing, sort-of)

this kinda ties in with that "unpredictability" thing LMNO said RAW talked about.

btw unpredictability, order and "entropy" (not the physical entropy, but the statistical one, how much information does a message carry) are tricky subjects.
on the one hand, white noise carries the theoretical maximum of information and is completely unpredictable, yet it is boring as fuck and not very creative.
and this is where CHAOS ties in, because for something to be "interesting" you need the right balance between order and disorder. just being completely random, or just being ridigly ordered is not enough.